...
❝He was the poison I was dying to taste on my lips.❞
...
I was a coward.
The coward who wanted to leave behind the wreckage of her life for the man who had tormented her for as long as she could remember. The boy who had spit venom at me gro...
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HE WAS DEAD.
Callahan Vanderbildt was dead, and to the world, it was a result of a car crash two days after the gala. A result of an unfortunate and tragic accident.
But the truth was locked in a vault only Esther Vanderbildt and I were privy to. Because she was the one who had driven a pen deep into his neck, unaware of Jalal's recovery as she'd entered his office, crazed and blood-thirsty. He hadn't been expecting it, after years of living with a woman who cowered for the fear of being repeatedly abused and losing her final tie to the man she loved.
He was on borrowed time anyway, after shooting Jalal Sadiq and managing to get away with it, using the darkness as a guise and having had all the cameras wiped, surprisingly having gotten lucky that Gulzar hadn't filed a complaint. Callahan had simply retreated home that night after staying at the gala for appearance's sake as if he didn't have blood on his hands, and my mother had waited for him to lower his guard before she struck, thinking that there was no further use to him if Jalal was dead.
But finding him in a pool of blood, my mother crouched beside him, had been anticlimactic, to say the least. If he was always meant to die at her hands, why wait this long?
She'd offered to turn herself in to the police but after making her promise to never touch drugs or affiliate herself with Jalal ever again, I dragged his body to his car, driving it to a forest before propelling it into a tree and lighting the fuel tank on fire.
An accident, nothing more.
I held zero regrets for covering up his murder. I'd never considered him a father and only saw it as ridding the world of one more heinous human being.
The town mourned the loss of such a great businessman, husband and father, their fake sympathy dropping the temperature of our mansion down another few degrees. The funeral had been a long-winded affair yesterday, irrelevant and irritating to have false niceties said about a man who deserved nothing more than to rot in his grave.
He was a good man. He didn't deserve to go so soon. He lived a successful life. His legacy will live on.
I had to refrain from rolling my eyes at that. If only they knew.
School was set to resume in a few days, but when life had started to feel like a fever dream, nothing seemed normal anymore. My father was gone after attempting to kill Ishwarya, I was grateful for the one man I'd hated for as long as I could remember and I'd lost her for good in it all.
I exhaled at the thought, driving through the familiar neighbourhood, for one glimpse of her, if anything.
The gate to her mansion remained open because of the engagement party happening today, allowing guests who'd been invited to attend. I, on the other hand, was not one of those people, despite my driving past her house for a third time.
